Wednesday 24 December 2008 07.42 EST
First published on Wednesday 24 December 2008 07.42 EST

Luke Caulfield's first show after graduating from the Slade in 2000 featured monumental photo-realistic paintings of teenagers dressed in death metal T-shirts. Painted as if observed from below, the kids looked as if they had just risen out of the depths of hell. At the time, there was a lot of talk about Caulfield's references – to metal, to teenage angst, to retrograde imagery and naturally, iconography. Yet Caulfield's subjects were anything but the teenage suburbanites, loosely wearing their allegiances on their sleeves, that we supposed them to be. What Caulfield's paintings revealed was the supremacy of the slogan, how ingrained our notions of particular genres are, and how they can be manipulated.

A year later and the artist had dispensed with the figures altogether, simply painting the T-shirts that they wore – yet the pictures still resonated with a dark misanthropy. By 2003, Caulfield was in Norway on a residency paid for by the Norwegian arts council documenting black metal culture. This in itself was another ambiguous situation: Norway has traditionally had a venomous antipathy to its most notorious export, partly for a spate of church burnings in the mid-1990s reportedly inspired and orchestrated by the black metal scene, and for the murder and suicide of two members of the band Mayhem. Yet by 2003, black metal was well into a populist revival, thanks in part to young artists, writers and film-makers who had spent much of the 80s in adolescent limbo enthralled by the scene's outsider status.

On Caulfield's return, he began imprisoning his paintings, concealing and encasing them in wooden boxes. He developed an alter ego, and used him to question ideas of ownership and authorship – just as he had done with his earlier portraits. His new exhibition continues to play with this doppelganger, even building a workspace for his alter ego: a void that seems to resonate with the supernatural tales of Haruki Murakami.

Why do we like him? For Ride to live/live to ride, a 2000 painting of a wild-haired metal kid with two fags hanging out of his mouth who is, in fact, the successful gallery owner Nicky Verber from Herald Street.

Art imitating life: His recent foray into the world of doppelgangers is not his first. Before being a painter, Caulfield was an actor and his hands were used as doubles for Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible.

Keeping it in the family: His dad was the late painter Patrick Caulfield.

How do I see him? Catch Caulfield before he heads to the British School in Rome at One in the Other gallery, E2, until 11 January.